4/22/2016

Donald Trump Has Fooled the Rubes But Doesn't Understand the Rubes

At some point, the monster is always going to turn against its creator. The creator will be revealed to have flaws that make him less a soaring god and more an earthbound man, and those human frailties will repel and anger the monster, who must then take out its anger by attempting to kill the creator. And, if it succeeds, sometimes the monster will eat him, too, for good measure.

So when Donald Trump's new campaign chief Paul Manafort met with Republican National Committee members, he assured them that his candidate, currently leading in the race for the party's nomination for president, was just fucking with everyone when it came to all the racist, sexist, and violent rhetoric he's been spouting. Manafort said of Trump, "When he's sitting in a room, he's talking business, he's talking politics in a private room, it's a different persona...When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose."

He continued, "He [Trump] gets it...the part that he's been playing is evolving into the part that now you've been expecting, but he wasn't ready for because he had to first feed the first phase." He also said that "The negatives will come down, the image is going to change."

You got that, right? Donald Trump was using a persona to project an image. We could pretty reasonably call that "acting," as in "playing a part." As in "lying." Or maybe, just maybe, he wasn't playing the part before and now he is going to fake it. Either way, there is a group that he's conning. And con men are known to get run out of town on a rail or beaten like rabid curs into the muddy streets.

See, Trump built his campaign on getting American rubes - your lottery players, your Kardashian viewers, your Olive Garden diners - to become the monster made of misdirected anger that he unleashed to fuck up the political world. That was phase one. If he veers toward moderation in the general, if he tones down the heated words, the very things that fed and fostered the monster, those rubes ain't gonna go along for the ride. The thing about a monster is you gotta keep that fucker fed or it's gonna devour you.

Trump's game has always been to con the yahoos. That was evident with Trump University or any one of the ventures that carry his name. And he's always had a blockade of lawyers to keep the rubes at bay. Now, though, he's going for a grand con, and he's playing with the emotions of a pretty unstable segment of the population. When this new "persona," this image projection he's shifting to, this phase two, displeases the rubes, he'll have nowhere to hide except to run away into one of his lairs of wealth.

And we'll all have to clean up the wreckage the monster leaves behind.